The challenges of small town life

In the comments to the Brooks item below, Neil asks me to address a couple of issues raised by commenters on the NYT site, re: David’s column:

1. One commenter notes that “Community also has its dark side.” Another suggests that Brooks is “lionizing” small-town America with a story that is perhaps unrepresentative. Have you ever fully addressed this “dark side” of community?

I think I have, on a number of occasions, though not in a single post. I experienced bullying and social exclusion when I was in high school — the sort of thing that you’d find anywhere, but when you live in a small town, and go to a small school, there’s really no place to find refuge. When I went off to a public boarding school for gifted kids, I found that my new friends there who had come from big-city schools were different from we who had come from small-town schools. We small-town kids mostly felt like we had finally found solid ground — a place where we wouldn’t be picked on for being weird, or bookish. The big-city kids had found their own niches in their big-city schools.

What Ruthie’s death and dying revealed to me is that the same qualities that a teenage me found so oppressive about small-town life were the very things that held my family up during this terrible trial. I saw these things with different eyes. As I’ve written before, Alan Ehrenhalt, in his 1995 book “The Lost City,” points out that we all want the blessings of 1950s-style community, without the burdens. This is an impossible dream. You can’t have both maximal individual autonomy and a strong sense of community. One has to give. Earlier in my life, I was prepared to give up community for the sake of liberty — not only was I prepared to do so, but I did do so. But as time went by, and certainly when my healthy sister was struck down by cancer at a young age, I came to understand the true value of what I had left behind. And I came to love it again. That’s why I’m here. It’s not that I expect to find utopia here. Some of the same things I bridled against when I was 15 are still present. But there is no such thing as the perfect place, and now I have been given the vision to see and to embrace the goodness that was here all along. With that, though, comes accepting all the limitations and flaws of small-town life, and affirming its goodness all the same.

I was speaking the other day to someone here who told me about an unlikely friendship he’d developed with an irascible older man, who has since died. My interlocutor told me that he couldn’t imagine another kind of place where a man like him could have made genuine friends with a man like the older one, given the radical difference, even hostility, between their views on life. What my interlocutor meant, I think, was that living in this small town compelled them both to look at each other and recognize their mutual humanity, despite their great differences, and to work through that. People who live in big cities like to think that it is they who live in a truly diverse context, but that is often only superficially true. You can, if you like, create a community for yourself in a big city in which you only ever have to deal intimately with people who are just like yourself. That’s just not possible in a small town, at least not in the small town where I live. You know everybody, and everybody knows you.

Neil:

I suspect that many will worry about exclusion. Would the entire town would have rallied around Ruthie if she were x?

I think probably they would have, though I don’t know. The thing to know about Ruthie is that they rallied around her in large part because she was the kind of person who was a friend to everyone, and who had taught many of the children in the community in the middle school. Ruthie was not a stranger; she was a big part of the community, and gave generously of herself. I can imagine that someone who lived a fairly reclusive life here probably wouldn’t have benefited from such an outpouring of generosity. But I don’t know. Julie and I were sitting here just now talking about the great time we had last night, with people just dropping by and staying late, feasting. I said to her, “That happened 10,000 times in our house growing up.” My folks were, and are, just like that. They’ve always been extremely hospitable, and always genuinely enjoyed it. You make that kind of investment in your neighbors, and people will rally to your side when you need them.

Neil:

2. Another commenter writes,”I also have sympathy for the millions of other people who don’t have such community support. Not everyone is lucky enough to have extended family and friends to care for them in their time of need, or to mourn their passing.”

It’s too easy, I think, to suggest that such people, who usually go on to suggest universal health care, simply want the benefits and not the obligations of community.

How would you respond to those who suggest that it is just unrealistic to think that most Americans can “rely on the kindness of strangers or a community,” so that Ruthie’s story, though wonderful, isn’t really all that politically relevant?

A few things come to mind. It’s puzzling to me how some folks want to jam this narrative into familiar political categories. I think you’re right that some folks want the benefits of community, but not the obligations. What’s peculiar is the idea they have that this kind of communal solidarity — of neighborliness — obviates the need for governmental support, e.g., Social Security. Why is it an either/or? Ruthie had good medical insurance that paid most of her bills, but insurance doesn’t cover everything, and it was a generous and needed thing for the community to hold a fundraising concert for her. Ruthie and her family took what was to be their final family vacation this past summer to South Carolina. I’m sure they used some of the concert money to pay for that. It was a great and unforgettable gift by the people of this community to the Leming family.

Anyway, to the extent that having the welfare state pay for certain things teaches the rest of us to forget our moral obligations to help our neighbors in time of trouble, the welfare state deforms the moral community. I know some on the right think that private charity should be the only form of charity, but that too is impossible. This place where I live is not wealthy, and it would be impossible for the community itself to meet all the medical needs of its residents. A community-focused conservatism would also be critical of a kind of libertarianism that allows individuals to do whatever they want to with themselves and their property, without any respect for the physical ecology of this place, or its moral ecology (Wendell Berry writes with real potency about this kind of thing, and how neither the conventional left nor the conventional right can offer an adequate accounting for the role of the individual in the community).

I consider it my moral responsibility to pay taxes to support the fire department, EMS, libraries, and other community institutions. But I don’t think my moral responsibilities to my neighbors ends with the payment of taxes.

Plus, given our national finances and the coming burden on the welfare state from aging Boomers, our government is going to be very hard-pressed to do even as much as it does now. We are going to have to find a way to re-establish and/or strengthen communal bonds, out of necessity. This is highly relevant, politically, and will become moreso. Robert Nisbet, I believe, said that the loss of community is one of the chief problems, and perhaps the chief political problem, of our society today. About the contemporary political relevance of the kind of conservatism with which I identify, Allan Carlson writes:

A second less-travelled path was conservative communitarianism, a defense of society’s little platoons, a suspicion of all big entities, including the great corporations and the national security state. While prefigured in Burke and also to be found in Russell Kirk, this orientation received full expression in the work of sociologist Robert Nisbet. His 1953 book Quest for Community focused on “the individual uprooted, without status, struggling for revelations of meaning, seeking fellowship in some kind of moral community.” Nisbet dissected what he called the “ideology of economic freedom” falsely built on an atomistic view of human nature. He argued that “the so-called free market never [really] existed at all save in the imaginations of the rationalists.” The 19th century capitalist system seemed to work, Nisbet asserted, only because it had inherited the moral capital of truly natural communities — the family, the village, the church — “which had nothing whatsoever to do with the essence of capitalism.” Direct social affiliation alone brought acceptable order: “Not all the asserted advantages of mass production and corporate bigness will save capitalism if its purposes become impersonal and remote, separated from the symbols and relationships that have meaning in human life.”

Could it be that the solutions, imperfect as they can only be, to some of our most intractable political and social problems might be worked out more effectively not in Washington, but in places like St. Francisville? I think so.

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31 Responses to The challenges of small town life

It’s done because when the left writes about community and how it takes a village the right tars it with labels like communism and socialism. But when the right talks about community and “real america” it’s about “taking our country back”.

Mr. Brooks wrote a beautiful story about a government employee (who was likely in a union) who attended a state school and married another government employee (who was likely in a union) but didn’t mention that the victim probably had really good health insurance that conservatives are trying to take away. Why was the fundraiser necessary?

Rich, let me enlighten you about something: not every conservative is whatever your cartoonish version of conservatism suggests. Secondly, the fundraiser wasn’t “necessary”; it’s something that local people wanted to do to show their love and support for my family in practical ways. The organizers told Ruthie and Mike that if they didn’t need any of that money to pay medical bills, that they should use it to take a family vacation, or to do something to ease Ruthie’s final months.

It’s interesting, and depressing, this human impulse to take an uncommonly good deed that shows people at their best, and to use it to make a nasty political point about one’s enemies. But that’s the world we live in.

I’m not going to pull this issue into an argument over “familiar political categories.” However, I will say that one of the reasons you are able to return to your home town with self-confidence, success, and satisfaction is that you had time away from it where you were able to experience autonomy and form a career and identity in a way that you wouldn’t have been able to had you stayed.

Rod, I grew up in a rural area and was the victim of bullying. When I return for reunions or other visits, the former bullies are all quite pleasant now. I think they just needed to grow up. It’s great that you home school. Your children will benefit from the advantages of small town life while avoiding the negatives that you and I encountered.

Rod, really appreciating these posts. I’ve lately been reading some Nisbet and Lasch. Just today I posted a couple of paragraphs from Nisbet connecting them to this passage from James D. Hunter’s The Death of Character which I think eloquently captures some of what is expressed above:

“We say we want the renewal of character in our day but we do not really know what to ask for. To have a renewal of character is to have a renewal of a creedal order that constrains, limits, binds, obligates, and compels. This price is too high for us to pay. We want character without conviction; we want strong morality but without the emotional burden of guilt or shame; we want virtue but without particular moral justifications that invariably offend; we want good without having to name evil; we want decency without the authority to insist upon it; we want moral community without any limitations to personal freedom. In short, we want what we cannot possibly have on the terms that we want it.”

Some of these NY Times comments reminded me of the old Irving Kristol line that liberalism has no problem with a 18-year-old girl fornicating in pornographic movies as long as she is paid minimum wage.

What liberalism cannot account for are irreducible goods that cannot be placed under the categories of choice, a desire preference, or economics without distorting our understanding of those goods. Fatherhood, for example, is not, according to liberalism, a role that receives its meaning because of its place in a social institution that we discover and do not define. For to think this way is to suggest that there are goods not under our control and by which our desire preferences are judged. Hence, the welling up of affection for Ruthie, manifested in acts of charity, must be explained away by something else. For to allow such acts to exist–as irreducible goods that may be performed for their own sake and for the sake of others–means that there are things that cannot be brought into being, defined, or controlled by the rationalistic state or the desiring individual chooser. For liberalism, this insertion of mystery, wonder, beauty, and spontaneous self-giving does violence to its narrative. So, liberals must reduce it, dismiss it, label it, or shout it down.

One of the advantages of aiming for maximum autonomy is that you do get to choose the sort of people you are going to be around, not having to deal with the village idiot (even if it is your brother-in-law). And yes, there are advantages to having neighbors that you get along with. I vividly remember when I was in college and my father had his first heart attack, while he was home recovering the neighbors from down the block came over to visit and see how he was doing and, all of a sudden, the man reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of hundred dollar bills as thick as my wrist and asked, “How much do you need?”

Well, we didn’t need money. The company kept paying my father all the time he was off work and my grandparents were far from poor but it was a very nice gesture.

But it was also dumb luck. We were lucky to be living with that kind of neighbors.

In a chosen community the element of luck is lessened. You know the people you are in with. And they are no less helping in time of trouble. When I was busy dying some years ago our friends wanted to organize a fundraiser for what they expected to be crushing medical bills and we were able to say, like my father, “Thank you, but no, we don’t need money.” The wall, literally, totally covered with get well cards was all the help I needed.

Rod: I don’t think my moral responsibilities to my neighbors ends with the payment of taxes.

I believe that this is the most accurate, brief definition of community I’ve ever encountered. I would personally express it differently, with two versions: One for liberals and one for conservatives.

To Liberals: Your moral responsibility to your neighbors is not fulfilled, not even close, with your continued support of government programs. Unless you are personally engaged, you don’t have a clear understanding of the plight of the needy and cannot possibly see whether their needs are actually being met.

To Conservatives: Your moral responsibility to your neighbors cannot be dependent on knowing their hearts or minds. Indeed, unless you personally engage with them, you will not know anything about their internal lives. Assumptions are the biggest obstacle to finding the balance between government intervention and how well individuals and communities see and fulfill social obligations.

To Both: Offering different phrasings to each group is something of an obstacle itself. The truth of the matter is that everyone makes assumptions, are rewarded for this “efficient” use of their time and energy when they turn out to be correct, and become defensive when they turn out to be incorrect instead of saying, “Okay. I was lazy as well as wrong. I need to get my feet on the ground and see with my own eyes.”

My personal and deeply held belief is that so long as there is the slightest “entry fee” to being considered a member of a community, that community is neither a true community nor is it true to itself. The American ideal is where any label beyond “fellow human and citizen” is secondary to community. These labels are not bad or to be avoided, but they are how we converse with each other about the specific issues of our communities and not dividing lines into sub-communities.

Some small towns are nasty places filled with mostly unpleasant people and a dark vibe anyone can feel. If your grandparents or parents weren’t in the right clans, you don’t have a prayer of happiness there. The people who want to live good, repectable and pleasant lives are either pulled back down by the snarling masses or driven away through (often literal and criminal) harassment.

People who idealize and laud small towns, and people who despise them and all they stand for, each should know of these differences in spirit in different locations.

Unless you are personally engaged, you don’t have a clear understanding of the plight of the needy and cannot possibly see whether their needs are actually being met.

Absolutely 100% true! There’s actually no way all of us can be personally engaged! That’s why we create ever-more complex large systems to deal with these issues. There are communities on the other side of the country which lack basic sanitation and utility infrastructure. There’s no way I could gain any personal understanding of their plight and how to solve it. However, the existence of a national government which stays aware of these things can deal with that. Heck, it’s what I pay them to do– deal with the things that I can’t.

Your moral responsibility to your neighbors cannot be dependent on knowing their hearts or minds. Indeed, unless you personally engage with them, you will not know anything about their internal lives. Assumptions are the biggest obstacle to finding the balance between government intervention and how well individuals and communities see and fulfill social obligations.

Which is precisely the point of not depending on community “good will” to solve our problems. What if someone was a bit eccentric and sort of a recluse? What if that person worked 40 miles away at a restaurant and wasn’t “engaged” in “the community”? Would there be an outpouring of love for that person in a crisis? Probably not because one wouldn’t have been in the “community”‘s field of vision (which would be totally excusable on the part of the community, outside any judgment a person received for not being “engaged” in the socially-approved way).

At the end of the day, “community” will always be voluntary. The community will choose whether to consider you a member of the community worth caring about. You are going to choose which part of the community you identify with and support. But our lives shouldn’t be dependent on the goodwill of the community.

The point is I go on “high alert” whenever I hear someone start to wax poetic about “community.” Especially when it’s coming from, well, people like me who spent their lives eschewing small town community in favor of cosmopolitan professional lives who are making a tendentious argument that the values of the community argue inevitably for supporting Republican policies (Brooks is famous for this).

It is impossible for anyone not to be dependent on the life around them.

True, but that’s not what people talk about referring to “community” in the small-town sense. I don’t think that Brooks or Dreher would argue that the national infrastructure of conservative foundations, state and national governments, and cities which foster a cosmopolitan open environment are “the community.” Dreher and Brooks have benefited immensely from those institutions which have served as their “community,” but it distinctly wasn’t the “small town, close knit, everyone getting together to support someone’s dreams/needs” Brooks is praising that made them who they are today.

Community’s benefits are deeply spiritual and personal. Let’s not conflate those (very real, very necessary) benefits with more practical needs. If you need to solve a practical problem, you come up with a solution to solve it. You don’t say, “well, first we form a community, and then we’ll hope to fulfill those other needs as a side effect.”

I think your sister’s story frightened New York Times readers in an interesting (and bizarrely political) way. So many were so quick to speculate on how she would have been treated if she were gay, or Muslim, etc..

I live in a small, conservative town. There’s a couple of guys here who are active in volunteering and in their church. They have lived together for years in a house they own together. They are quiet, dignified and self-effacing. If they had a need, this very conservative, religious community would rally around them, even though we all know they’re gay. They don’t talk about it, and neither do we. Openness is not a huge value here, perhaps because “openness” comes with this underlying presumption that others are interested in you, which is felt as a form of vanity.

We have a bunch of Hindu and Muslim doctors who, in addition to strenuous professional obligations, serve the community in additional ways (coaching, etc.). They are highly beloved, have a loyal following, and would also inspire fund-raisers, were they to need them. Ditto for atheists who serve the community.

So yes, we would all probably support these people. Why? They are generous individuals whom we know through their level of service to the community. The key is service, not self-expression. Self-expression is secondary. Your political opinions are fine, but nobody’s interested in them, and that goes double for your sex life. I think your average New York Times adherent would find the idea of stifling his or her own opinions just too unbearable. There is a narcissism to this that is amusing.

So, yes, gays can’t be real open and be accepted, but they’re not exactly all hiding in the closet either. So, to a certain extent, they limit their self-expression. But so does everyone else. You may argue that different people do that to a different degree, and you may be right, but in a place like this, you really have to learn to get along with everyone else as best as you possibly can. Autonomy is a fine thing, and I don’t want to under-appreciate it. But in real life an excess of it can become loneliness and isolation. Perhaps Ruthie’s story made some readers uncomfortable, because it made them aware of the fact that they don’t have a social safety net, which they interpret weirdly as being in conflict with, or a threat to, the government one.

KMT, you are so right. A (liberal, agnostic) friend here was telling me the other day about how in the 1990s, the local Episcopal parish came to the aid of a gay man and his partner as the man died of AIDS. The people of the parish never said a word about his homosexuality, nor did they feel the need to. Here was a man most of them didn’t know — he was fairly new up here — but who had in some way associated himself with their parish, and who needed their help. They provided it. They cooked for the couple, they did errands for them, all sorts of things. That’s how it is here. I can well imagine that many, perhaps most, of those Christians who served that dying gay man did not in the least approve of his sexuality. But what they saw was a fellow human being who was suffering. So they stepped up.

Rod, perhaps your sister and your family just happen to be extraordinary? I think I may have told this story here before, but at my maternal grandmother’s funeral, my father had a loaded revolver in his pocket. This was because one of my uncles, who’d lived with my grandmother in the last years of her life, and done so as a wastrel squandering money that should have gone to better care for her, had made threats to my mother when she remonstrated with him on that issue. No bloodshed ensued, and everyone behaved, but the tension was thick. Not a Hallmark moment–and it was in a small town where everyone knew everybody.

The same small town, in fact, in which my mother remembers vicious rumors about who was illegitimate, who was sleeping with whom that they weren’t married to, about how the “trashy” families lived, etc. There were indeed many cases in which the town wouldn’t have rallied around you if you were x, as Neil puts it. All that without even mentioning Jim Crow laws.

I know of other families in the small-town Appalachia of my youth in which there is constant bickering when a mother or father is sick on their deathbed over who gets what. As soon as the funeral is over, they swoop in like buzzards over a dead wildebeest on the Discovery Channel.

I don’t mean to sound like a cynic or to deny the great goodness you’ve experienced, but the plural of “anecdote” isn’t “data”. Yes, we miss connections, we trade the community of small towns for the autonomy and often loneliness of the city, etc. However, as an article I read awhile back somewhere pointed out, there’s a reason that as soon as economy and mobility allowed it, extended families quit living together. It wasn’t Evil Capitalism that did it, even if it might have abetted it–it was people who wanted to get away from Mom/Dad/son/daughter/uncles/aunts/etc. who cut out for other parts.

Also, as you rightly point out, you had a rare and highly unrepresentative opportunity to return to your hometown. Most people in most lines of work, if in a situation like yours, would simply not have found it feasible to return without severe or even impossible sacrifices.

In discussions of small-town community vs city alienation, I’m sometimes reminded of the Bushman tribes of South Africa. In the 80’s, they were idealized as gentle, peaceful, happy, communal, Noble Savages (remember The Gods Must Be Crazy?). Then later research showed that even before the fragmentation of Bushman society in modern times, there were (surprise!) violence, child abuse, rape, etc. in their societies. Maybe in smaller quantities, but still there (see here and here for some sources).

I know this is a bit rambling, but the point is that Original Sin is everywhere, and IMO it’s problematic to idealize small-town life–or any other, for that matter–or to imply that it should be normative. I’m not saying you’re necessarily doing that, Rod, though by your own admission you’re an extremely emotional type who easily gets caught up in things. On the autistic test you mentioned a few posts ago I scored just a few points shy of an Asberger’s diagnosis, actually, so maybe I’m a bit more cool, detached, and cynical. Or maybe my temperament causes me not to function as well in tight-knit communities to begin with. I don’t know. I am convinced that people are people, and that you get the noble and the ignoble, the good and the bad (and the ugly), pretty much everywhere, in small town or city, among the San Bushmen or in Louisiana or New York.

I’d like to end by commending the posts of Charles, Franklin, e, and JustMe at 3:37. Also, for another perspective, I’d refer anyone interested to Willa Cather’s powerful short story “The Sculptor’s Funeral“.

There is no such thing as a “national” community. Maybe such a thing can exist in a country whose size is less than (say) 200 miles between borders, but not in the US. Um, label the preceeding IMO, of course.

That’s not a criticism, that’s an observation. We have a national culture (well, such as it is), but that’s not a substitute. I would argue that community by definition consists of people who can see and touch each other… which is also why I wax cynical about people praising online “communities”.

I also don’t mean to imply that engagement requires 24/7 proximity. Rod’s latest post is a case in point for me. I see it as an example of my “definitional” phrase “fellow human and citizen”, by which I meant that we offer our neighbors a default respect and trust until and unless they prove unworthy of it. That they fit under one or more labels against which we have some antipathy may or may not be that proof, but engagement also means making the effort to listen and observe them. To extend your 40-mile commute person hypothetical, maybe he stops along the way home to spend an hour or two cooking and delivering meals to poor or sick people, or helps teach a cooking class to youngsters. His new neighbors could learn that about him only by making that initial effort to engage him, or being welcoming to his making that initial effort.

“It’s puzzling to me how some folks want to jam this narrative into familiar political categories.”

Maybe they did that cuz Bobo framed the story in terms of “conservatism,” albeit of the alleged communitarian kind.

To wit:

“Dreher is a writer for The American Conservative and is part of a communitarian conservative tradition that goes back to thinkers like Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet. Forty years ago, Kirk led one of the two great poles of conservatism. It existed in creative tension with the other great pole, Milton Friedman’s free-market philosophy.

“In recent decades, the communitarian conservatism has become less popular while the market conservatism dominates. But that doesn’t make Kirk’s insights into small towns, traditions and community any less true, as Rod Dreher so powerfully rediscovered.”

It can’t just be seen as a charitable gesture, no, it has to be framed as part of a “conservative” tradition. The acts of charity and concern of the folks of the small town have to be conscripted as opportunities to demonstrate the validity of Russel Kirk’s alleged “insights.”

Moreover, both this blog and Bobo’s column, but especially the latter, are generally concerned with politics. Folks reading your blog and, even more so, Bobo’s column, can therefore perhaps be forgiven for thinking that some sort of political point is being made. And this is especially true given how, at least since GHW Bush and his “Thousand Points of Light,” conservatives, particularly those who want to be seen as more “compassionate” than their cold hearted, free market uber alles brethern, consistently posit self help, community, charity, and so forth as actual, viable alternatives to government programs.

“What liberalism cannot account for are irreducible goods that cannot be placed under the categories of choice, a desire preference, or economics without distorting our understanding of those goods. …For to think this way is to suggest that there are goods not under our control and by which our desire preferences are judged. Hence, the welling up of affection for Ruthie, manifested in acts of charity, must be explained away by something else. For to allow such acts to exist–as irreducible goods that may be performed for their own sake and for the sake of others–means that there are things that cannot be brought into being, defined, or controlled by the rationalistic state or the desiring individual chooser. For liberalism, this insertion of mystery, wonder, beauty, and spontaneous self-giving does violence to its narrative. So, liberals must reduce it, dismiss it, label it, or shout it down.”

As a liberal, I can account for the charitable impulse quite easily in terms which you claim that I cannot: it is mostly about consumption. People give to charities because it makes them feel good about themselves. A charitable gift is a purchase of “good feelings.” And that is the most “charitable” explanation. Another one is that, in many cases, by giving one gets to control. The gift with strings attached is not exactly unknown. Another motive for charity is prestige: people like to be seen as charitable, because that makes them look both morally good and materially well off. The flip side of that is that if one does not give, one might be considered either as morally lacking or as poor.

Such considerations are not unique to small town settings. Every community has its pet concerns. Every community has its fashionable charities. When I was an undergraduate at a large, liberal, East Coast university, giving to Oxfam was all the rage. Students were regularly and publicly solicited for Oxfam in the cafeteria. I, personally, did not give, because, for one thing, I did not have a whole lot of discretionary funds, and, for another, I think charities such as Oxfam probably do more harm than good (distort local economies, promote proximity to Westerners as an economic and political benefit, hurt local farmers, infantalize and degrade the recipients, and so forth), but what really got my goat was the smug, outraged, dismissive attitude of the solicitor when I informed that I would not be contributing….”Oh, YOU don’t GIVE, right?” Plenty of folks give simply so as not to hear that, or have others hear that said of them.

e, could you share some examples of these horrific, “dark” communities where “snarling masses” harass those who are from unacceptable “clans”?

I’m not denying that such loathsome communities exist (in which case, they aren’t terribly good examples of “community”), but this seems to be a rather caricaturistic embellishment of the urban/cosmopolitan prejudices regarding small towns. I–who grew up in a small town and have spent time in several others–have never visited one of these hellish places you obliquely reference. I would like to know what places I should avoid in future!

Rod,
You wrote, “not every conservative is whatever your cartoonish version of conservatism suggests”. You probably think so but then how do you explain that when Rick Perry announced his support for providing support to illegal immigrant children the backlash from that hall and all conservative media was so strident that he now has backtracked from a policy of decency to something that looks like your cartoon.

I live in a very conservative place and the vile things that I hear people say about Obama and his wife tells me that there’s something else going on. Something that the non cartoonish people you believe are out there need to stand up and loudly denounce, over and over.

Thanks so much for answering the questions – it’s very generous of you. I probably would describe myself as a “communitarian,” but as a rather hesitant one. The main reason for my hesitance (and my channeling of the Times commenters’ issues) is Robert Putnam’s disturbing finding that more diverse communities are less trusting, cohesive, and participatory. Apparently, ethnic diversity doesn’t lead to conflict but withdrawal – anomie and social isolation, says Putnam. This is true for liberals and conservatives and different age groups. (I know that you’ve posted on Putnam.)

Therefore, if one is a minority (as I am), and if one desires the positive goods of diversity – ranging from creativity to economic growth, or at least finds diversity to simply be inevitable, one has to find a way to strengthen community without prescribing homogeneity. (Without going into details or becoming too controversial, it should be noted that a lot of paleoconservative rhetoric seems to prescribe homogeneity in the name of community.)

Putnam names a few possible ways for a community to be diverse but have a high level of sociability. Tellingly, at least in one publication, his first two examples are the Army and evangelical megachurches. But they’ve succeeded in combining diversity and sociability because they are not traditional – they reconstruct social identities through, among many other things, strict anti-discrimination legislation and having members be “born-again.”

In my own experience as a college teacher in a small town, I can see that to my mostly white students diversity and sociability are negatively correlated. When I teach the Great Depression, following Alan Brinkley and others, I mention that part of the reason that Americans didn’t turn to radical ideologies was that they felt a reverence for neighborliness and solidarity and that there was something even mystical in the togetherness of the American people (see The Grapes of Wrath or a Frank Capra film). I ask if that reverence still exists. Nearly all of my students say it doesn’t, and when I ask why, it uncomfortably seems that diversity (of all sorts) is the underlying answer.

You are right that “We are going to have to find a way to re-establish and/or strengthen communal bonds, out of necessity.” I’m looking forward to your explorations of how this is possible, despite the pessimism of the average NY Times reader.

Might I suggest that one of them writes this very blog? Here’s something you need to do: Intellectually and historically, conservatism is not a political ideology. Per Oakeshott’s definition, it is a non-dogmatic disposition that is just as liable to avoid the perturbations of ideological politics altogether. Perry is no conservative; on the other hand, I fail to see how verbal insults toward Obama constitute a wholesale indictment of conservatism of any kind.

It should also be noted that the United States doesn’t possess a robust conservative tradition. That which goes by the name “conservatism” in America is really a simple permutation of liberalism, as is its “polar opposite” the progressivism of the Democratic party. Communitarianism and localism are really different animals altogether that, while latent in American life, have never had concrete ideological expressions. Thought experiment: when did Americans last have the choice of electing a communitarian or localist to national office? Indeed, perhaps the very notion is oxymoronic.

Liberalism (as distinct from what passes for “liberalism” these days) and what passes for “conservatism” these days have something in common: a tendency to assume that anything worth while can be monetized. After all, liberalism grew out of free market capitalism, and has always prioritized the liberty of the tycoon to do what he wishes with his property, modified by some concessions to the employees of those same tycoons when it seemed they might actually revolt. Modern “conservatism” simply kept the idolatry of the market, and dropped the attempt to bribe the workers into passive acceptance.

From either perspective, what our gracious host has offered is almost incomprehensible. But it is a good, balanced, presentation that there are benefits and prices to ANY choice. I love New York, because I experience it on the cheap when visiting family who live there. They love living there — which I’m not sure I would, but at least one of my sister’s children thinks a smaller city in the midwest might be worth trying out. I prefer to RESIDE in the upper midwest.

Hang around here at ‘TAC’ for a while and you’ll find them. There are cerebral conservatives around here that don’t eat up everything coming out AM radio. We oppose unnecessary military conflicts, and we’re – get this—concerned about the environment. Many of us are also very concerned with the grotesque consumption by the middle and lower classes; we know who benefits from that deal.

I hope you stay and learn a few things. But first you have to stop looking for that Limbaugh-esque boogy man hiding around every corner. We’re different here.

“After all, liberalism grew out of free market capitalism, and has always prioritized the liberty of the tycoon to do what he wishes with his property, modified by some concessions to the employees of those same tycoons when it seemed they might actually revolt.”

This is just false in terms of intellectual history and philosophical development. It contains a kernel of truth, but, in general, wrong.

Reading Rod’s comments on community, taxes, wjo gets help and from where, it struck me as a mostly pragmatic point of view (“this works, that doesn’t work, etc.).

So when, towards the end I read:

“… given our national finances and the coming burden on the welfare state from aging Boomers, our government is going to be very hard-pressed to do even as much as it does now …”

‘m reminded that one reason we are hard -pressed is because we do not handle health care like all the other developed countries (Japan, Canada, most of Europe) that have single-payer or a very strongly regulated system. Adopting that approach would make it much easier for government to provide support for aging Boomers and many others as well (Estimates are that with single-payer or a regulated equivalent allows the U.S. to pay down the debt and go into surplus in a few decades without more taxes or benefit cuts.)

For pragmatic reasons, that’s why I think we should adopt the health-care system similar to that of other developed nations. I would hope that Rod’s pragmatic outlook would lead him to share that view.

I think you’d have a hard time showing that that people here are leaders in the Conservative Movement at large other than the oft-misunderstood Pat Buchanan (who is unfortunately saddled with a speaking voice and face that make his reasonable arguments sound angrier than I think he means them to be.)

In my experience commutarians left or right for prefer congratulating eachother for our rightness than risking the blowback from confronting the larger movements on their mistakes.

Sands, almost thou persuadest me to be a conservative… although Viking has a point that the “leaders in the Conservative Movement at large” do not seem to be listening. Or should we say, those whom the pundits (left, right, and center) have annointed as “leaders in the Conservative Movement at large.” I still don’t know why anyone started calling George W. Bush “the front-runner for the Republican nomination” in 1999, except that some well-place pundits and better-placed lever-pullers started calling him that, until, repeated often enough, people believed it.

Rob: This could be the beginning of an interesting conversation. Could you perhaps offer a specific sound byte from intellectual history, and/or philosophical development? I will try to respond at the same level of intellectual caliber you offer. I’m not, at present, certain whether you are speaking of the intellectual history of liberals, conservatives, or current “liberals” and “conservatives.” Your sense of either is probably NOT guided by John Stuart Mills’s aphorism, “While it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.” I’m not sure that’s true either… but were do we begin?

Adopting single payor health care at this point would not give us the prices of, say, Canada. It would probably restrain furure healthcare inflation to something like Canada’s rate, but we would start from where we are at right now. SIngle payor is not a magic wand that can change the past.

You can experience both the good and bad of small town life while living in a big city. My wife is from an Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn, and I lived there for several years after getting married. Some of the people were very insular, rarely leaving the neighborhood. I called them urban hicks. On the other hand, everyone on the block seemed to know each other and there was a very strong sense of community.

“Could it be that the solutions, imperfect as they can only be, to some of our most intractable political and social problems might be worked out more effectively not in Washington, but in places like St. Francisville? I think so.”

I met a ‘fella yesterday gathering signatures for the nomination papers I need to submit to run for the county board (Pepin County, Wisconsin) again. He asked: “Why is it the further government is away the less it seems to work?” And he answered his own question: “I guess because it’s much harder to make a piss-poor decision in front of your neighbors and friends.” A good point, I do believe.

Rod,
What a wonderful essay. I couldn’t wait to get out of Andover, Ma where everyone knew my parents and father in particular, and my siblings (and me), and get to NYC. After 25+ years my husband and I were blessed to adopt a son and when he turned nursery school age we moved to a small town in Northeast PA where we had a weekend place. I understood the rhythms of small town life. All the things I wanted to escape came right back to me as a full-timer – always be on your best behavior, smile and say hello to everyone (when I go to Manhattan now and smile at everyone I get some pretty strange looks), stop and chat with neighbors, and so on, and I understand the pleasure of these things now. One thing I like about my town is the mix of people, and I don’t think it’s terribly uncommon. It’s just that New Yorkers are myopic. We have expats from NY of course, country people, locals, Europeans who came to open restaurants and sporting schools, and so on. This part of PA is mixed politically, which I consider a good thing. Not enough of that in NYC. And maybe because there’s also a big Ron Paul/Gary Johnson/libertarian contingency and maybe because rural life promotes a live and let live attitude, I never feel I’ve sacrificed my liberty because I now have to be nice to my neighbors (something I didn’t understand when I was younger). There is a real feeling of “social cooperation” and many community programs to help those in need (and their pets). This is not to say there isn’t crime and often of the kind caused by drinking too much. Still, whenever a neighbor is in need you can be sure there are people around to help. Isolation is largely a choice, one that even single people or those without family need not make unless they want to. Thank you.